WE'LL COME TO YOU.

Since we aren't on every social media site, let us come to you. Enter your email below and we'll send you our monthly handwritten newsletter. It will be written during the hours of moonrise, and include featured posts, wild tangents, and rowdy stick figures.

Handwritten is a place and space for pen and paper. We showcase things in handwriting, but also on handwriting. And so, you'll see dated letters and distant postcards alongside recent studies and typed stories.

About You

We welcome things in handwriting, but also things on handwriting: old letters, dated postcards, invented alphabets, napkin sonnets, journaling journeys, marginalia, or secret ingredients to family recipes.So long as it has to do with art or act of writing by hand, it belongs here. We have few guidelines, as we don't want to get in between you and your thoughts, but we are happy to help at any stage, from idea generation to editing. Be it a single image or something longer, we'd love to see where your hand has taken you, metaphysically or otherwise. The main logistical question: is what you're submitting in handwriting (an image) or is it on handwriting (typed)?

A submission can also be a 2,000-word story about your handwriting routine or a micro-essay about how your characters in your novel demand that you build them paper homes. Whatever the subject and length may be, send us your typed words in a Word document. Get wild and wide, but if you want a bit of direction, we find that 400-600 words is a great pace. And do send us some accompanying images. The main difference between these two columns is that the emphasis here is on the story.

A submission can be as simple as a single shot of something handwritten: letter, poem, notebook, signature, grocery list, graffiti, or tattoo. For most pictures, the iPhone camera can suffice. We encourage people to send us 3 - 5 images per submission. Also, when you send your submission, include your name, a potential title for the piece, and any accompanying text, if you'd like to include some context. If we're playing show and tell, "In Handwriting" is show, and "On Handwriting" is tell. Sorta.

GET PROMPTED

Want some ideas? While you can submit anything to us at anytime, you can also submit some things to us at some times. This winter, we're looking to hear and see how handwriting is surfacing in the below ways:

Politics & Protests

The election left a chaotic dent in the world. No matter how or if you voted, the impact is everywhere — online, in the streets, on walls. We've seen it surface in handwriting in various ways: from kids writing letters to Donald Trump about kindness to the Post-It Note Wall in Union Square Subway Station. Handwriting has a political past, and can be, as we're seeing, a form of protest. But it also plays an important role in how we process difficult moments. In stories, drawings, images, or drafts, send us your observations, experiences, and understandings post-election.

Routines & Rituals

It's winter outside. No better time to cozy up next to the log fire, or broken radiator, in your favorite onesie and write (while having a glass of whiskey). Last year, we published a touching tradition, I Saw In My Mind a Sparkling Vision of Them, in which a mother hand-wrote messages on each present to her children. We take gift-giving as serious as we do ironing (and ironing is a weekly ritual), so this story gave us hope. No matter how light or dark, tell us: how do you experience the handwritten holidays?

Places & Spaces

When we need a little bit of social silence, we go to our favorite tavern: the one below street level, all wood, with the Chuckanut Pilsner. We order two beers, write a single letter to a positive force, and depending on how many sips that took, we might have time for a little doodling in our sketchbook. There is a word in Japanese for these kinds of private places in public: anaba, or, little known good place. Atmosphere is everything, so tell us about the spots, spaces, and places you go when you need to a little more room to write in.

Resolutions & Reflections

The New Year can be a tricky period of time. A tug-of-war perhaps. Which makes us think, there should be more tug-of-peaces. Anyway, we recently discovered a calming quote: "To look backward for a while," wrote Margaret Barber, "is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward." We know everyone does the New Year a little differently, from writing resolutions to contemplative practices, or from eating herring to choosing a single word to set the mood for the upcoming year. Tell us how you experience this change in time.

Get lost and be in touch.

submit@handwrittenwork.com

We don't have a postal address yet. We know, this should have come first.